Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (219 page)

He looked at me and I saw him rub his face, as if to brush off some wetness round his eyes. “Means nothing to you,” he said gruffly. “Newly come from Spain, damned black-eyed girl. But if you were English, you’d be a worried man now; if you were a man, and if you were a sensible man instead of being a girl and a fool at that.”

He swung open the door and set off into the great hall on his long legs, nodding at the soldiers who shouted a good-natured greeting to him.

“And what will happen to us?” I demanded in a hissed whisper, trotting after him. “If the young king dies and his sister takes the throne?”

Will threw me a sideways grin. “Then we shall be Queen Mary’s fools,” he said simply. “And if I can make her laugh it will be a novelty indeed.”

*  *  *

My father came to the side gate that night and he brought someone with him, a young man dressed in a cape of dark worsted, dark ringlets of hair falling almost to his collar, dark eyes, and a shy boyish smile. It took me a moment to recognize him; he was Daniel Carpenter, my betrothed. It was only the second time I had ever seen him, and I was embarrassed that I failed to recognize him and then utterly shamed to be seen by him in my pageboy livery in golden yellow, the color of the holy fool. I pulled my cape around me, to hide my breeches, and made him an awkward little bow.

He was a young man of twenty years old, training to be a physician like his father, who had died only last year. His kin had come to England from Portugal eighty years ago as the d’Israeli family. They changed their name to the most English one they could find, hiding their education and their foreign parentage behind the name of a working man. It was typical of their satirical wit to choose the occupation of the most famous Jew of all—Jesus. I had spoken to Daniel only once before, when he and his mother welcomed us to England with a gift of bread and some wine, and I knew next to nothing about him.

He had no more choice in this marriage than I, and I did not know if he resented it as much, or even more. They had chosen him for me because we were sixth cousins, twice removed, and within ten years of each other’s age. That was all that was required and it was better than it might have been. There were not enough cousins and uncles and nephews in England for anyone to be very particular as to whom they might marry. There were no more than twenty families of Jewish descent in London, and half as many again scattered around the towns of England. Since we were bound to marry among ourselves we had very little choice. Daniel could have been fifty years of age, half blind, half dead even, and I would still have been wedded to him and bedded by my sixteenth birthday. More important than anything else in the world, more important than wealth or fitness for each other, was that we would be bound to each other in secrecy. He knew that my mother had been burned to death as a heretic accused of secret Jewish practices. I knew that beneath his smart English breeches he was circumcised. Whether he had turned to the risen Jesus in his heart and believed the words of the sermons that were preached at his local church every day and twice on Sundays would be something I might discover about him later, as in time he must learn about me. What we knew for certain of each other was that our Christian faith was new, but our race was very old, and that we had been the hated ones of Europe for more than three hundred years and that Jews were still forbidden to set foot in most of the countries of Christendom, including this one, this England, which we would call our home.

“Daniel asked to see you alone,” my father said awkwardly, and he stepped back a little, out of earshot.

“I heard that you had been begged for a fool,” Daniel said. I looked at him and watched his face slowly color red till even his ears were glowing. He had a young man’s face, skin as soft as a girl’s, a down of a dark moustache on his upper lip, which matched his silky dark eyebrows over deep-set dark eyes. At first glance he looked more Portuguese than Jewish, but the heavy-lidded eyes would have betrayed him to one who was looking.

I slid my gaze from his face and took in a slight frame with broad shoulders, narrow waist, long legs: a handsome young man.

“Yes,” I said shortly. “I have a place at court.”

“When you are sixteen you will have to leave court and come home again,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows at this young stranger. “Who gives this order?”

“I do.”

I allowed a frosty little silence to fall. “I don’t believe you have any command over me.”

“When I am your husband…”

“Then, yes.”

“I am your betrothed. You are promised to me. I have some rights.”

I showed him a sulky face. “I am commanded by the king, I am commanded by the Duke of Northumberland, I am commanded by his son Lord Robert Dudley, I am commanded by my father; you might as well join in. Every other man in London seems to think he can order me.”

He gave a little gulp of involuntary laughter and at once his face was lighter, like a boy’s. He clipped me gently on my shoulder as if I were his comrade in a gang. I found I was smiling back at him. “Oh, poor maid,” he said. “Poor set-upon maid.”

I shook my head. “Fool indeed.”

“Don’t you want to come away from all these commanding men?”

I shrugged. “I am better living here, than being a burden on my father.”

“You could come home with me.”

“Then I would be a burden on you.”

“When I have served my apprenticeship and I am a physician I will make a home for us.”

“And when will that be?” I asked him with the sharp cruelty of a young girl. Again I watched the slow painful rise of his blush.

“Within two years,” he said stiffly. “I shall be able to keep a wife by the time you are ready for marriage.”

“Come for me then,” I said unhelpfully. “Come with your orders then, if I am still here.”

“In the meantime, we are still betrothed,” he insisted.

I tried to read his face. “As much as we ever have been. The old women seem to have arranged it to their satisfaction if not to ours. Did you want more?”

“I like to know where I am,” he said stubbornly. “I have waited for you and your father to come from Paris and then from Amsterdam. For months we none of us knew if you were alive or dead. When you finally came to England I thought you would be glad of…be glad of…a home. And then I hear you and your father are to set up house together, you are not coming to live with Mother and me; and you have not put aside your boy’s costume. Then I hear you are working for him like a son. And then I hear you have left the protection of your father’s house. And now I find you at court.”

It was not the Sight that helped me through all of this, but the sharp intuition of a girl on the edge of womanhood. “You thought I would rush to you,” I crowed. “You thought you would rescue me, that I would be a fearful girl longing to cling to a man, ready to fling myself at you!”

The sudden darkening of his flush and the jerk of his head told me that I had hit the mark.

“Well, learn this, young apprentice physician, I have seen sights and traveled in countries that you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at a man for his help.”

“You are not…” He was lost for words, choking on a young man’s indignation. “You are not…maidenly.”

“I thank God for it.”

“You are not…a biddable girl.”

“I thank my mother for that.”

“You are not…” His temper was getting the better of him. “You would not be my first choice!”

That silenced me, and we looked at each other in some sort of shock at the distance we had come in so little a time.

“Do you want another girl?” I asked, a little shaken.

“I don’t know another girl,” he said sulkily. “But I don’t want a girl who doesn’t want me.”

“It’s not you I dislike,” I volunteered. “It’s marriage itself. I would not choose marriage at all. What is it but the servitude of women hoping for safety, to men who cannot even keep them safe?”

My father glanced over curiously and saw the two of us, face to face, aghast in silence. Daniel turned away from me and took two paces to one side, I leaned against the cold stone of the doorpost and wondered if he would stride off into the night and that would be the last I would see of him. I wondered how displeased my father would be with me if I lost a good offer through my impertinence, and if we would be able to stay in England at all if Daniel and his family considered themselves insulted by us newcomers. We might be family and entitled to the help of our kin, but the hidden Jews of England were a tight little world and if they decided to exclude us, we would have nowhere to go but on our travels again.

Daniel mastered himself, and came back to me.

“You do wrong to taunt me, Hannah Green,” he said, his voice trembling with his intensity. “Whatever else, we are promised to one another. You hold my life in your hands and I hold yours in mine. We should not disagree. This is a dangerous world for us. We should cleave together for our own safety.”

“There is no safety,” I said coldly. “You have lived too long in this quiet country if you think there is ever any safety for such as us.”

“We can make a home here,” he said earnestly. “You and I can be married and have children who will be English children. They will know nothing but this life, we need not even tell them of your mother, of her faith. Nor of our own.”

“Oh, you’ll tell them,” I predicted. “You say you won’t now, but once we have a child you won’t be able to resist it. And you’ll find ways to light the candle on Friday night and not to work on the Sabbath. You’ll be a doctor then, you will circumcise the boys in secret and teach them the prayers. You’ll have me teach the girls to make unleavened bread and to keep the milk from the meat and to drain the blood from the beef. The moment you have children of your own you will want to teach them. And so it goes on, like some sickness that we pass on, one to another.”

“It’s no sickness,” he whispered passionately. Even in the midst of our quarrel, nothing would make us raise our voices. We were always aware of the shadows in the garden, always alert to the possibility that someone might be listening. “It is an insult to call it a sickness. It is our gift, we are chosen to keep faith.”

I would have argued for the sake of contradicting him, but it went against the deeper grain of my love for my mother and her faith. “Yes,” I said, surrendering to the truth. “It is not a sickness, but it kills us just as if it were. My grandmother and my aunt died of it, my mother too. And this is what you propose to me. A lifetime of fear, not Chosen so much as cursed.”

“If you don’t want to marry me, then you can marry a Christian and pretend that you know nothing more,” he pointed out. “None of us would betray you. I would let you go. You can deny the faith that your mother and your grandmother died for. Just say the word and I shall tell your father that I wish to be released.”

I hesitated. For all that I had bragged of my courage, I did not dare to tell my father that I would overthrow his plans. I did not dare to tell the old women who had arranged all of this, thinking only of my safety and Daniel’s future, that I wanted none of it. I wanted to be free; I did not want to be cast out.

“I don’t know,” I said, a girl’s plea. “I’m not ready to say…I don’t know yet.”

“Then be guided by those who do,” he said flatly. He saw me bridle at that. “Look, you can’t fight everyone,” he advised me. “You have to choose where you belong and rest there.”

“It’s too great a cost for me,” I whispered. “For you it is a good life, the home is made around you, the children come, you sit at the head of the table and lead the prayers. For me it is to lose everything I might be and everything I might do, and become nothing but your helpmeet and your servant.”

“This is not being a Jew, this is being a girl,” he said. “Whether you married a Christian or a Jew, you would be his servant. What else can a woman be? Would you deny your sex as well as your religion?”

I said nothing.

“You are not a faithful woman,” he said slowly. “You would betray yourself.”

“That’s a dreadful thing to say,” I whispered.

“But true,” he maintained. “You are a Jew and you are a young woman and you are my betrothed, and all these things you would deny. Who do you work for in the court? The king? The Dudleys? Are you faithful to them?”

I thought of how I had been pledged as a vassal, begged as a fool and appointed as a spy. “I just want to be free,” I said. “I don’t want to be anybody’s anything.”

“In fool’s livery?”

I saw my father looking toward us. He could sense that we were far from courtship. I saw him make a little tentative move as if to interrupt us, but then he waited.

“Shall I tell them that we cannot agree and ask you to release me from our betrothal?” Daniel asked tightly.

Willfully, I was about to agree, but his stillness, his silence, his patient waiting for my reply made me look at this young man, this Daniel Carpenter, more closely. The light was going from the sky and in the half darkness I could see the man he would become. He would be handsome, he would have a dark mobile face, a quick observing eye, a sensitive mouth, a strong straight nose like mine, thick black hair like mine. And he would be a wise man, he was a wise youth, he had seen me and understood me and contradicted my very core, and yet still he stood waiting. He would give me a chance. He would be a generous husband. He would want to be kind.